Hill Towns (26 page)

Still, in the utter quiet and near darkness, the scene had an enchantment about it. I hoped the women felt it, too. It was all, really, that they would take home with them from La Serenissima. The Serene City.

“Give me your flowers,” Sam whispered, and I 212 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

handed them to him, and he made a little sound as the second gondola drifted directly under us. The women looked up.

“
Bellissima
,” Sam called down softly, and threw the flowers into the lap of one of the women. She caught it, her mouth open in a perfect O.

“Thank you,” she called from under the bridge as the gondola vanished. Then it reappeared. We stood for a moment longer, looking after them. They were talking softly, excitedly, among themselves and looking back and waving.

I wondered if they had recognized Sam but thought probably they had not. It was enough this way. They would retell this story for years: about the night in Venice when flowers fell from a dark bridge into their gondola.

“That was a lovely thing to do,” I said.

“It really was, darling,” Ada Forrest said, and took Sam’s arm.

“It was,” Joe said. “I bet it was the first time anybody gave her flowers since the mister passed.”

He put his arm around me lightly, and I looked down into the green water and saw us all there, my crowd, my community, my husband, me. I would have been hard pressed, at that moment, to say which of us was real.

W
E MET AT FLORIAN’S THE NEXT MORNING FOR

CAPPUCCINO and brioche and to decide what to do with ourselves. Somehow we had all contrived to avoid the subject last night; no one seemed to want to break the beautiful, fragile skin of the scene on the bridge. And I think we all knew there would be discord this morning. The heat that the mist and rain had held at bay had finally straggled in from Rome, and even before nine the humidity was stunning, a palpable thing. Neither Joe nor I had slept well. I had lain awake very late and felt and heard him tossing. When we finally woke, heavy and damp and slow, we did no more than exchange our ritual morning conversation. Neither of us mentioned the Lido, but it hung between us, white and burning as if we were already there.

I knew he was not going to give it up. And I knew I simply could not go.

There was a message for us when we went past the desk, from Yolanda:
Have some crafty business over on
213

214 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

Burano. See you for lunch and, if not, for dinner. Leave message where. XXX, Yolie
.

“What’s on Burano in the way of crafts that would interest Yolie?” I said to Sam and Ada, who were waiting at a table outside Florian’s. I almost wanted to shake them both: Sam looked as roaringly vital as ever in the shredded cutoffs and shirttail-flapping blue denim, the dreadful hat riding high on his red forehead, and Ada, in her trademark cotton gauze, looked like a woman carved of ice. No tossing in damp sheets for them; the Regina and Europa had efficient air-conditioning hidden behind its billowing white drapes.

“Lacemaking,” Ada said. “Almost every woman on the island does it, and it’s exquisite. There are seven stitches in Burano and Venetian point lace, and each woman specializes in one, so every piece gets passed around until it’s finished.

A tablecloth center will take about a month. I can’t imagine Yolie trying to get her viewers to make lace, though. It takes years to learn. Whole generations of young girls ruin their eyesight doing it—”

She broke off and looked at Sam, who was laughing.

“I imagine Yolie’s trying her hand more at making whoopee than lace,” he said. “The simple fishermen of Burano are notably potent and ardent. An American woman with a nice solid ass and no squint could get laid by eleven, have the best
vongole
in the lagoon for lunch, and be back in time for tea.”

“If you mean she’s going over there to pick up a man, you should be ashamed of yourself,” I said to Sam. “You should have seen her last night when those three creeps came on to us outside Harry’s. They’re probably halfway to Rome by now.”

“Yolie wants to be the one to choose,” Sam said.

HILL TOWNS / 215

“Don’t worry about her, Cat. She’s been cruising ever since we’ve known her. She’s smart and careful; nothing’s going to happen to her and she won’t catch anything. Yolie has more condoms in her wallet than I did when I was fifteen.

She just likes to screw. Nothing wrong with that.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

“I’ll say there isn’t,” Joe said. “Speaking of which, have the newlyweds patched it up? I gathered there was trouble in Tahiti last night.”

“Gauging from the sounds coming from behind the nuptial door, I’d say they have,” Sam said. “Lord God, I hope they wear the edge off before long. I don’t know how much more I can take.”

“You didn’t hear a thing. You were asleep before your head hit the pillow last night,” Ada said, smiling reprovingly at him. So, I thought, they didn’t make love. And banished the thought almost before it formed. But it seemed to me suddenly, sitting there in the thick morning heat of Venice, that everybody in this entire lagoon seemed to be screwing everybody else all the time.

“Well, I wish Yolie had told me she was going,” Ada said.

“I wanted to get Maria and Colin a piece of lace, perhaps a tablecloth. It’s much less expensive on Burano than here.

Maybe we could go ourselves; would you like to see it, Cat?

The little town is very picturesque, and the seafood is really wonderful.”

I thought of the squinting children, the near-blinded girls.

“I hoped maybe to take a look at Saint Mark’s this morning, Ada,” I said. “It’s the one thing I don’t want to miss, and it seems awfully hot for much else.”

“I,” Joe said pleasantly, “am going to the Lido. Who 216 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

ever wants to come with me, meet me at the landing stage in an hour.”

He did not look at me.

“Then you shall surely fry,” Ada said, smiling, “but I’ll come with you. Our hotel launch will take us for free. Come by for me, and we’ll leave from there. Cat? Sam?”

“This morning’s my date with Saint Lucy,” Sam said. “Cat, if you want to come along, I’ll trot you through Saint Mark’s when we’re done. I warn you, Saint Lucy lives in an utterly undistinguished church at the end of the most execrable street in Venice, but I make it a point to drop in on the little lady whenever I’m here.”

“Who’s Saint Lucy?” I said. I could not imagine Sam, with his scalding contempt for the Catholic Church, visiting any saint at all.

“Saint Lucy was a young lady of Syracuse who, when an unwelcome suitor praised her beautiful eyes, plucked them right out rather than tempt him further. The Venetian Cru-saders liberated her body from Constantinople and brought her here, and her mortal remains lie in state above the donations box in the Church of San Geremia, which has never had anything to do with her at all. She had her own church here for a while, but the railroad authorities kicked her out of that in the mid-nineteenth century. Her sight was miraculously restored, and she’s become the patron saint of eyesight and, by virtue of truly Venetian logic, artists. I guess she’s my only superstition. The cash box has a prayer written on it:
Saint Lucy, protect my eyes
. I always toss her a wad of lire. Can’t hurt.”

“Is it really her?” I said. “I mean, is it her…bones or what?”

“Well, she’s pretty desiccated, but yep, it’s her,” Sam said, his wolf’s grin widening. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

HILL TOWNS / 217

I was about to say that perhaps I’d go on over to the Lido with Joe and Ada after all when Ada said, “Sam, really. Cat doesn’t want to go look at Saint Lucy. Don’t press her. It would have to be painful.”

“Why?” Sam said. I thought he was honestly puzzled.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake. Because of her daughter. Really, darling, sometimes your sensitivity rather misses the mark.”

There was a trace of real annoyance in Ada’s voice.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry, Cat,” Sam said swiftly. “I just didn’t think. Let me show you Saint Mark’s. I’ll do Saint Lucy tomorrow—”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’d love to see her. I’m not sensit-ive about Lacey’s blindness, Ada; she’s gotten us all way past that.”

“Too bad saints can’t work retroactively,” Joe said. “Maybe we could pool our lire and lift the curse off Lacey in utero, as it were. Or the German measles, or whatever.”

I felt myself go still and cold. “Nobody ever really knew what caused it, Joe,” I said. “You know that. There was no evidence I had German measles. Sometimes you just…don’t know.”

“I once thought it was that fear of yours that marked her somehow,” he said, as pleasantly as he might be saying it was a fine day. “Cat was afraid of almost everything back then, when she was pregnant with Lacey. Of course, I know logically that couldn’t be. But sometimes it would be nice to have the kind of faith that believed miracles were possible.

Or could find reasons for things. Don’t you think?”

And he smiled around at us, the warm white smile made whiter by the deepening tan of his face and the sun-bleaching of his mustache, and I felt run through 218 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

with the pain of his words—and a following freezing anger.

“Well, I’m not afraid anymore,” I said. “Not of anything.

Let’s get going, Sam. I’ll meet you in the Europa lobby in ten minutes. I want to get a sun hat.”

I got up and walked away across the sunny stones of the piazza of Saint Mark. Already the flocks of tourists and pigeons were gathering. Behind me, Joe called, “Cat?”

“No,” I said, and walked on.

Sam and I had been walking for a few minutes in silence, elbowing our way through the listless, heat-clotted crowds moving like a great, slow tide toward the Rialto Bridge, when he said, “It’s because I’m painting you, isn’t it? He wasn’t taking potshots at you when we first met. It started with the painting. What does he think, that I’m screwing you on the side? We should stop right now.”

“No,” I said. “We’re not going to stop the painting. Not unless you want to for a real reason. Like being finished, or deciding it isn’t working. It started when he lost his clothes, or—I don’t know, Sam, it started when Italy got out of control and he couldn’t make it work right. Joe’s always been on top of his world. Always. He was punishing me today because I wouldn’t go to the Lido with him. I’ve never not done what Joe wanted to do before. It isn’t that I obey him; it’s that we’ve always wanted the same things. But now, over here…it’s like we were identical twins, who’d always been told we were just alike and part of the same flesh, and then we woke up one day and found we were very separate people. We’re surprised and hurt and angry. I’m really very HILL TOWNS / 219

mad at him, because what he said hurt a lot, but I also know he didn’t mean it. And he knows beyond any doubt that you’re not…screwing me on the side. So let’s drop it.”

“Consider it dropped,” Sam said. “But he’d be wise not to be so sure of you. If he thinks other men don’t think about that when they look at you, he’s out of his mind.”

I felt heat in my face and chest and low down, in the pit of my stomach. I pulled the brim of the sun hat I’d bought down over my face. On my right in a tiny shop, one of many crammed into an arcade, I saw an array of medals, dusty on black velvet. I thought they were religious ones; I recognized Saint Mark’s winged lion and the disenfranchised but still popular Saint Christopher.

“You promised me a bridge-crossing medal,” I said. “Here’s your chance.”

“So I did,” he said, and went in and conducted an earnest, crooning conversation in ridiculous Alabama-accented Italian with the shopkeeper, an old woman so bent she looked like a dwarf. I thought of the terrible child dwarf in Daphne du Maurier’s
Don’t Look Now
and pulled at Sam’s arm in instinctive revulsion, but the thin woman turned to me with a smile so purely sweet and benevolent that I smiled back.

“Santa Zita,” she said, and proffered a small dimly stamped oblong medal on a pewter-colored chain. I could make out no particular features at all on the medal, but I smiled back at her and said, “
Grazie
.” Sam pressed lire into her hands and lifted off my hat and dropped the chain over my head.

The medal fell into the small hollow between my damp breasts, just out of sight under the neck of my blouse. It felt icy cold there, and heavy, and somehow wonderful.

220 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

The old woman patted my arm.

“
Sicuro
,” she said. “Safe.”

“Yes.
Si. Grazie
,” I said and, to Sam, “Bring on the bridges.”

“I think we’ll get the vaporetto at the Rialto,” he said. “It’s just too damned hot and crowded to walk anymore. I wish I could offer you the Europa’s launch, but I don’t think it goes anywhere near the Lista. And besides, Ada has most appropriately turned it into Cleopatra’s barge for the duration of her stay.”

“Does that make Joe Mark Antony?” I said, and began to laugh. We were still laughing when the Number One vaporetto wallowed up to the landing stage and we got on for the ride to the Campo San Geremia. I don’t know why. It was not particularly funny.

Sam was right about the Lista di Spagna and the church of San Geremia. The street was a carnival affair, a haven for day-trippers who would go no farther into Venice than this tawdry midway, and the church had little to recommend it but the tattered little mummy behind the altar and a beautiful old campanile, twelfth century, Sam said, and one of the oldest left in the city. Still, I was glad I had come, glad to leave my lire for Saint Lucy, glad in some profound interior way that felt oddly and irrationally like the paying of a very old debt.

“I think,” I said to Sam, getting on the vaporetto for the trip back to San Marco and the splendors of the waiting Basilica, “that I might have made an amazingly good Catholic.

The Graham Greene kind.”

“God forbid,” he said, but he asked for no explanation and I gave him none.

After the Lista di Spagna and San Geremia, the typical dogtrot Sam Forrest tour of San Marco and the Palazzo Ducale was like being shaken inside a kaleido HILL TOWNS / 221